Dr Una McIlvenna

About

(MA, PhD, London)

My research interests lie in the fields of early modern cultural and literary history. My monograph, Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici (forthcoming, Ashgate), looks at how the reputations of aristocratic women at the early modern French court were constructed, attacked and defended in a society where literacy was beginning to gain supremacy over orality.

My current project investigates emotional responses to public execution in the early modern period, looking in particular at the use of songs and verse in accounts of crime and execution across Europe. Crime reports were often printed in huge numbers on cheap pamphlets and set to the tune of well-known songs, enabling the reader to sing along to the account of the (often violent) crime and the public execution of the condemned. My research examines how the emotional resonances of a familiar tune could be transferred or subverted in the new version of the song. Central to my work is the idea that singing the news of crime and punishment was a long-standing, pan-European tradition. I’ve begun to widen my research into news-songs on all sorts of topics: natural disasters and wonders, military battles and sieges, and politics and social satire.

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron', the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress's own Machiavellian purposes. Branded a 'cabal of cuckoldry' by a contemporary critic, these women were involved in scandals that have encouraged a perception, which continues in much academic literature, of the late Valois court as debauched and corrupt.
Rather than trying to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, Una McIlvenna here focuses on representations of the scandals in popular culture and print, and on the collective portrayal of the women in the libelous and often pornographic literature that circulated information about the court. She traces the origins of this material to the all-male intellectual elite of the parlementaires: lawyers and magistrates who expressed their disapproval of Catherine's political and religious decisions through misogynist pamphlets and verse that targeted the women of her entourage.
Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici reveals accusations of poisoning and incest to be literary tropes within a tradition of female defamation dating to classical times that encouraged a collective and universalizing notion of women as sexually voracious, duplicitous and, ultimately, dangerous. In its focus on manuscript and early print culture, and on the transition from a world of orality to one dominated by literacy and textuality, this study has relevance for scholars of literary history, particularly those interested in pamphlet and libel culture.

Article

McIlvenna, U. (2016). The Rich Merchant Man, or, What the Punishment of Greed Sounded Like in Early Modern English Ballads. Huntington Library Quarterly79:279-299.

This paper explores how the ballad melody of the 'Rich Merchant Man' was fundamentally linked to a drive to educate the serving classes of seventeenth-century England in the appropriate expectations of the ever-growing merchant class, via a negative model of punitive retribution that stressed the need to be charitable and to shun greed for material wealth. In so doing, it offers a case-study of the multi-media methods by which this moral lesson of frugality and even charity – so seemingly contradictory for a merchant class that defined itself by the accumulation of wealth – could be inculcated in the youth it was attempting to train.

McIlvenna, U. (2015). When The News Was Sung: Ballads as News Media in Early Modern Europe. Media History[Online]. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2016.1211930.

News songs differ in crucial ways to the other news media of the early modern period like newsletters, newspapers, or diplomatic correspondence – they differ even from the prose broadsheets and pamphlets that they so closely resemble. As historians of news we need to ask different kinds of questions of these multi-media artifacts. For example, how does the presentation in a performative genre affect the dissemination and reception of information about events? What part do orality and aurality play in how the news was sold and received? Here the activities and social status of street singers play an important role. We must consider the production, format and distribution of these songs in order to understand their impact. We also need to pay attention to the conjunction between text and melody, and the ways in which this affected the presentation of a news event. On a broader scale, what kind of information can ballads provide about specific news events that other documents cannot or will not provide? Can they offer us a new medium by which to interpret historical events? And lastly, how should historians deal with these profoundly emotive texts? The combination of sensationalist language and affecting music meant that songs had the potential to provoke a more powerful response than any other contemporary news source, and this emotional potency can at times be challenging for a modern historian to decipher and explain. This article will attempt to answer some of these questions and suggest some of the skills we as historians need to develop in order to appreciate the full meaning of songs as the most popular of news media in early modern Europe.

McIlvenna, U. (2015). The Power of Music: the Significance of Contrafactum in Execution Ballads. Past & Present[Online]229:47 -89. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtv032.

This paper looks at how song was employed across Europe for centuries as a
vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, and how this performative medium
could both frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. In particular, it
focuses on the ancient, pan-European tradition of contrafactum, the setting of new words to old
tunes, that was a feature of this early form of news media, revealing the significance of the
choice of music to the transmission of information.

McIlvenna, U. (2014). Medieval and Early Modern Emotional Responses to Death and Dying. Parergon[Online]31:1-10. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2014.0078.

This special issue of Parergon offers nuanced case studies of how people responded to death and dying in the medieval and early modern period to demonstrate that, despite its inevitability, death produces different emotions depending on the specific historical and cultural moment. Moreover, they reveal how scholars can begin to locate and identify those emotions when the discourses around, and attitudes towards, death have changed so profoundly from the past to the present day.

McIlvenna, U. (2012). Word versus Honor: The Case of Françoise de Rohan vs. Jacques de Savoie. Journal of Early Modern History[Online]16:315-334. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342322.

This paper examines one of the most notorious scandals of sixteenth-century France. In 1557, Françoise de Rohan, a lady-in-waiting to Catherine de Medici, launched a legal battle to get the duke of Nemours, Jacques de Savoie, to recognize their orally-agreed marriage contract and formally recognize the child whom he had fathered with her. Central to Rohan's case were not only the love-letters Nemours had written to her but also the eye-witness testimonies of her servants, who had overheard their marriage vows and had witnessed their love-making. Nemours's only defense was his word of honor as a gentleman that no marriage had taken place. This paper situates the case of Rohan vs. Nemours within a transitory period in French society as oral and literate cultures competed for precedence, and asks what happens to the concept of honor when the spoken word is no longer to be trusted.

Book section

McIlvenna, U. (2016). Singing Songs of Execution in Early Modern Italy. in:Dall'Aglio, S., Rospocher, M. and Richardson, B. eds.Voice and Writing in Early Modern Italian Politics, Religion, and Society.Ashgate.

This essay demonstrates that Italian execution ballads, while in many ways representative of a pan-European tradition of singing the news of crime and punishment, demonstrate a range of stylistic differences from their European counterparts that had significant consequences for the expression of emotion around public executions, and for the nature of the oral, sung performance of news in early modern Italy. Although Italian songsheets lacked the tune direction so common in other languages, the widespread availability of melodic formulas for set metrical forms means that a person without musical training could easily sing these songs. This has enormous repercussions for the dissemination of news in early modern Italy. If the uneducated masses were able to immediately sing these songs because they possessed a mental repertoire of melodies applicable to specific song-types, they would be able to more easily memorize their contents and re-perform them, thereby disseminating the information more widely. With their combination of news and entertainment (along with the occasional moral lesson) in an aurally accessible and memorable form, ballads were therefore an effective means of broadcasting and circulating the news in a period of low literacy rates.

McIlvenna, U. (2016). Ballads of Death and Disaster: The Role of Song in Early Modern News Transmission. in:Zika, C. and Spinks, J. eds.Disaster, Death and Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400-1700.Palgrave, pp. 275-294.

This paper explores how ballads presented and mediated the news of death and disaster, and in doing so how they functioned within the early modern system of information transmission. Why did early modern Europeans sing songs about distressing events in which people suffered loss and pain, or died brutally or in large numbers? By looking at songs about two of the most popular news topics of the day, public executions and disasters, we can get a sense of the manner in which balladry differed in its presentation of the news from the prose pamphlets that circulated at the same time. I show that ballads acted as a vehicle of learning, a pedagogic tool that encouraged their listener-singers to interpret negative events as a warning of divine retribution and as an opportunity to repent for one's sins. While prose broadsheets presented such news in a similar way, songs' ability to be easily memorised and repeated meant that they were the most effective medium for the dissemination of such a message in an early modern Europe racked by violence, death and disaster. They can therefore provide an explanation for the ubiquity of apocalyptic belief and discourse in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

McIlvenna, U. (2016). Punishment as public spectacle. in:Broomhall, S. ed.Emotions in Early Modern Europe.UK: Routledge.

This short essay explains the various methods of punishment that existed in early modern Europe, and the emotions they were intended to inspire in both the spectators and the victim.

McIlvenna, U. (2015). Poison, Pregnancy and Protestants: Gossip and Scandal at the Early Modern French Court. in:Kerr, H. and Walker, C. eds.Fama and her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe.Brepols, pp. 137-160. Available at: http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503541846-1.

This chapter examines the scandalous case of Isabelle de Limeuil, a lady-in-waiting to the sixteenth century French queen mother Catherine de Medici, whose notorious affair with the Protestant Louis de Bourbon, prince of Condé, illegitimate pregnancy, public birth and subsequent imprisonment for attempted poisoning was the stuff of gossip at courts across Europe. Given the multiplicity of scandalous factors in this case, and the historical contingency of many of those factors, the story of Isabelle de Limeuil provides an illuminating study of how gossip and rumour could be expressed and controlled at the early modern court.

This chapter examines the construction of the myth of the sixteenth-century French queen mother Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron' through the literature of the sixteenth century, in particular, the defamatory pamphlets and verse libels that portrayed the queen's household as a site of debauchery and prostitution. Revealing the authors of this satirical literature and their motives, it then traces how their satirical representations came to be treated as genuine descriptions of life at court by later historians; in other words, how satirical literature became historical 'fact'. I compare this negative representation of the court to the realities of life in the queen's entourage, revealing that – in contrast to her alleged 'Italian' predisposition to manipulation – Catherine's appointments to her household fell within distinctly French traditions. Rather than Catherine's presiding over the 'stable of whores' for which satirical writers and historians gave her credit, this chapter shows that she took steps to ensure a household of experienced, respected and politically moderate members. The 'flying squadron' is revealed to be a reductive, misogynist fantasy that developed in response to the increasingly prominent role of women at the early modern French court.